Measuring populism worldwide

Abstract

<jats:p> Populism studies have rapidly burgeoned but systematic global empirical evidence about this phenomenon has lagged behind. How can party values be measured in consistent, valid, and reliable ways, facilitating identification of varieties of populism in countries around the world? To address this issue, part I outlines the conceptual framework. Part II describes the research design. The Global Party Survey (GPS) replicates previous expert surveys, expands coverage worldwide, and incorporates innovative scaled measures of populism. It draws upon estimates from 1861 experts and covers 1043 political parties in 163 countries (see https://www.GlobalPartySurvey.org ). Part III summarizes some key cross-national results. Part IV presents robustness tests which confirm that the new GPS estimates of ideological values and populist parties are consistently correlated with several previous measures. The conclusion in part V summarizes the main findings and considers the potential uses of the data set for understanding populism as a global phenomenon. </jats:p>

When the US far-right sneezes, the European far-right catches a cold. Quasi-experimental of electoral contagion from Spain

“…We argue, very much in agreement with the existing literature (Mudde, 2017(Mudde, , 2019, that Trump, as a radical right-wing populist and authoritarian nationalist (Norris, 2020;Norris & Inglehart, 2019), falls neatly within the far-right party typology. Indeed, Mudde (2017) argues that the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency on the back of a conventional party ticket is illustrative of what he pens the "mainstreaming" of the far-right that has taken hold democratic states following the turn of the century (Mudde, 2019) and, more recently, following the financial crisis of 2008.…”

“…Trumpismwhich combines of anti-immigrant nativism, socially conservative authoritarianism, of the European populist radical right (Mudde, 2017, p.48). Descriptive data from the Global Party Expert Survey (Norris, 2020) supports the argument that there is crossnational symmetry between the ideological positions advocated by the Republicans (under Trump) and those parties that are well-established as constituents of the populist radical right. In Figure 1 we illustrate that the Trump's Republican party falls nearly within the the hard-line socially conservative right-wing authoritarian space that VOX, and a battery of other European far-right parties, inhabit.…”

“…Just as Bischof and Wagner (2019) argue that far-right success can embolden further far-right support, we present a theoretically symmetrical argument that posits that far-right losses can undermine self-expressed far-right support and that these effects are not restricted by state boundaries. We hypothesise that the electoral defeat of an emblematic leader of the transnational far-right movement like Trump (Mudde, 2016(Mudde, , 2017Norris, 2020) can trigger a contagious reduction in support for the far-right cross-nationally. Electoral defeat is likely to serve as a heuristic of the potential viability and likely success of these parties that triggers voters to update their prior levels of support for radical right-wing challengers.…”

Rally ’round the barrack: Far-right support and the military

“…Only radical-right parties, which core ideology is nativism (a combination of nationalism and xenophobia) could be populist. In the case of VOX, the existing literature defines the party as a populist radical right-wing party Norris, 2020). It is worth noting, however, that whilst the party belongs to the radical cohort of the far-right family, there are substantive sections within the party's electoral constituency who hold anti-democratic extreme right preferences (Rama et al, 2021).…”

Religion and American Populism: The View from the 2020 American National Election Study

“…Despite a rapidly expanding literature, however, explanations for this American populism have failed to "converge" (Norris 2020). Most theories about populism's causes fall into two distinct categories, focusing on either cultural resentment or economic stress, although some scholars have sought to connect the two (Rodrik 2020).…”